Alexei Ratmansky

Alexei Ratmansky was born in St. Petersburg and trained at the Bolshoi Ballet School in Moscow. His performing career included positions as principal dancer with Ukrainian National Ballet, the Royal Winnipeg Ballet and the Royal Danish Ballet. He has choreographed ballets for the Mariinsky Ballet, the Royal Danish Ballet, the Royal Swedish Ballet, Dutch National Ballet, New York City Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, The Australian Ballet, Kiev Ballet and the State Ballet of Georgia, as well as for Nina Ananiashvili, Diana Vishneva and Mikhail Baryshnikov. From 2004 to 2008 Alexei Ratmansky was Artistic Director of the Moscow Bolshoi Ballet. In 2009 he became Artist in Residence at the American Ballet Theatre. After 13 years, he moved to New York City Ballet in the same position in 2023. Since 2024 he is also Associate Artist of Dutch National Ballet.

For the Bolshoi Ballet, Alexei Ratmansky choreographed full-length productions of The Bright Stream (2003) and The Bolt (2005) and re-staged Le Corsaire (2007) and the Soviet-era piece Flames of Paris (2008). For American Ballet Theatre, he created the ballets On the Dnieper (2009), Seven Sonatas (2009), Waltz Masquerade (2009), The Nutcracker (2010), Dumbarton (2011), Firebird and Symphony #9 (2012), Chamber Symphony, Piano Concerto #1 and The Tempest (2013), The Sleeping Beauty (2015), Serenade after Plato’s Symposium (2016), Songs of Bukovina (2017), Whipped Cream (2017), Harlequinade (2018), The Seasons (2019) and Of Love and Rage (2020) among others. For the Metropolitan Opera’s production of Verdi’s Aida Alexei Ratmansky choreographed new dances in 2009. With the Ballet Zurich he presented his reconstruction of Petipa’s and Ivanov’s Swan Lake in 2016. 

Alexei Ratmansky earned the prestigious Golden Mask Awards by the Theatre Union of Russia for his Dreams of Japan (1998) and Jeu de Cartes (2007). In 2001 he was made Knight of Dannebrog by Queen Margrethe II of Denmark. In 2005, he was awarded the Prix Benois de la Danse for Anna Karenina for the Royal Danish Ballet and won a second Benois for his Shostakovich Trilogy in 2014. Under his direction, the Bolshoi Ballet was named »Best Foreign Company« in 2005 and 2007 by The Critics’ Circle in London, and he received a Critics’ Circle National Dance Award for The Bright Stream in 2006 and the Shostakovich Trilogy in 2020. In 2013 he was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow. 

In its Tänze Bilder Sinfonien programme, the Vienna State Ballet presented Alexei Ratmansky's Pictures at an Exhibition, created in 2014 for the New York City Ballet, for the first time. This European premiere was followed in 2022 by a new production of the 24 Préludes created for the Royal Ballet London. In 2025, Callirhoe, set to the music of Aram Khachaturian, will be the first full-length narrative ballet by this renowned choreographer to be performed with by Vienna State Ballet.